


Not of your element

by goosecathedral



Category: Twelfth Night - National Theatre (2017), Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Cabarets, F/F, Post-Canon, Theatre, Triple Drabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 10:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19665400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goosecathedral/pseuds/goosecathedral
Summary: Malvolia achieves greatness.





	Not of your element

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theprokaryotekid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprokaryotekid/gifts).



Anticipate. She likes the word, and because she shows affection earnestly, is pedantic about its meaning. It’s not synonymous with ‘expect,’ it means getting your own strike in first. Revenge is a word she likes less and less. Reactive, reactionary even. (She’s fussy about the distinction between those, too.)

This new world has taken some getting used to. No point protesting when people stay up drinking till first light here: anyway, a snifter after work can easily take you to dawn, when you get off at half-three. She’s wary about love affairs, and surprised to find her caution is widely shared; as Sally says, posing a gilt cigarette-holder to display emerald fingernails, it’s incestuous if they’re in the business and civilians are just _impossible_. For the Gräfin who took the best table in the house for a fortnight running and filled her dressing-room with orchids before inviting her to a long weekend at the Metropole, she makes an exception: you can’t really call the Austrian nobility _civilians_. Religion’s another sticking-point: unbelief she doesn’t mind, but the profession inclines to the most superstitious forms of Catholicism. The tact she learned in her former life is useful there, though. In fact, the continuities are many, probably more numerous than the differences. Anticipation, mainly. You have to know what the punters want before they know themselves, and at that she has no rival.

And revenge? In time, they will all come: eventually, everyone you’ve ever known passes through the faux-ivory bead curtain into the Bar Éléphant, it’s that sort of place. Knights and ladies’ maids, dukes, countesses and fools, pirates and even less reputable adventurers, they all wash up here, their eyes fixed upon her as she belts out a torch ballad under the broiling floods: their leading light, their beacon, their lode-star.


End file.
